Geoffrey Egan

Elected 30 April 1998

This obituary was first published in The Times on 22 January 2011

Geoffrey Egan was born on 19 October 1951 and died on 24 December 2010, aged fifty-nine. He spent his life studying the small things that Londoners had lost or discarded in the Middle Ages and later; he was probably the first archaeologist to head a City of London guild.

In archaeological parlance, Geoff was a ‘small finds expert’, but with an encyclopaedic range. In the children’s toys, dice or pilgrims’ badges that he studied, or the lead seals attached by London’s cloth merchants as a guarantee of provenance and quality — the subject of his doctoral thesis — Geoff saw stories of daily life and changing fashion and the developing economy of a city that was to become the capital of a world-wide empire.

The medieval and post-medieval periods were still regarded as ‘fringe’ territory in the 1970s, the realm of the historian rather than the archaeologist. That began to change with the rapid pace of development in London and the discovery of huge quantities of well-preserved organic objects of wood, leather and bone, offering new insights into domestic and industrial life. It was to this ‘detritus’ that Egan devoted his life as the Museum of London archaeology service’s specialist in medieval and later non-ceramic finds.

His impressive series of books on small finds from London are now classic reference works, including Dress Accessories (1991, with Frances Pritchard), Lead Cloth Seals (1995), Playthings from the Past (1996), The Medieval Household (1998, the year he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries), Trifles, Toys and Trinkets (2005, with Fellow Hazel Forsyth) and Material Culture in an Age of Transition (2006), about everyday objects from the Tudor and Stuart periods. He also co-wrote Meols: The Archaeology of the North Wirral Coast (2007, with Fellows David Griffiths and Robert Philpott), about the enormous number of later medieval and post-medieval finds discovered at the site of a beach market on the Wirral Peninsula.

Geoff relished nothing better than finding a type of object that had been neglected in recent scholarship. He would then scour libraries and antiquarian bookshops for anything that would throw light on the subject and read voraciously until he had mastered all the facts. As a result, the house that he had inherited from his parents was filled with a sea of books.

In 2004 he was seconded to the British Museum as national finds adviser on early medieval to post-medieval finds for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a post that he described as his dream job, and that was made permanent in July 2010, only a few months before his death. The most interesting finds he wrote up in successive annual reports on portable antiquities and treasure.

In May 2009 Geoff was elected Master of the Company of Arts Scholars, Dealers and Collectors — quite possibly the first time that a professional archaeologist had ever served as the head of a City of London guild. He delivered the company’s fourth annual lecture, on ‘Glorious Mud: Treasures from the Thames’, last October, made memorable by music played on a replica of the late fourteenth-century trumpet, 1.6 metres in length, that Egan himself had found during excavations at Billingsgate.

For Geoff, that Thames mud was a huge lucky dip that kept on giving up archaeological treasures and, at a time when many in the archaeological community were hostile to the activities of mudlarks and detectorists scouring the foreshore for finds, Geoff shared their passion for discovery and helped to bridge the two worlds.

Geoff died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis on Christmas Eve. Despite his sociability, love of jazz and good food, and large and international circle of friends, his lifestyle was nevertheless not one easily shared with a companion, and he never married. He regarded his best friend and next of kin, the garden and landscape designer Graham Martin, as more like a brother than the cousin he was.